Reputable authorities have documented industry's difficulty with successfully implementing either strategic plans or initiatives (e.g., reengineering: ⅔ fail; mergers: 57% fall short; IT projects: only 34% are implemented and take twice as long and twice as much money as projected). In addition, common frustrations of business executives around resulting from rapid rate of change can be paraphrased as follows:                “There's so much going on I can't get my arms around what it all means for improving the way we do business, and when I get close to a really important strategic initiative, particularly one affecting multiple aspects of the enterprise, it's usually in trouble.”        
As a result of today's shortening business cycles and global, dispersed organizations, a key competitive issue is how quickly an organization can successfully realign its people around initiatives to change the organization's business model or react to unforeseen circumstances or opportunities. Existing strategic planning and project management practices, which are actually or effectively separate processes, do not work quickly or effectively enough for a rapidly changing competitive environment:                Initiatives are proliferating in virtually every organization at an increasing rate due to technology shifts and, at any one time, are difficult to visualize or interpret strategically.        Local initiatives are often designed without a clear connection to overall corporate strategic goals and priorities, or with each other, so efforts can end up being at cross purposes or poorly coordinated.        Strategic thinking is not prevalent in the design of many initiatives which thus tend to perpetuate current practices more than find new ways to grow and prosper.        Existing management practices are often too informal and undisciplined to stay focused on key priorities or to keep abreast of changing circumstances.        Projects tend to be managed individually without strategic context so people working on teams do not understand how their actions contribute to the business.        Managers spend too much time administratively keeping “all the balls in the air” and too little time working proactively on substantive issues driving the business.        
As a consequence of these problems, organizations find it more and more difficult to meet basic business expectations or to get crucial change initiatives accomplished. Organizations have difficulty translating outside events or new ideas into strategic plans and initiatives that get implemented. Today management needs a quick, cohesive general management process and tools designed for agility in the 21st century. There are examples of agility and high performance; in fact organizations across different industries have been held out as singularly successful and numerous studies have identified specific aspects—leadership, culture, customer relations, quality—that correlate with high growth and results.
The Web and Internet technology allow far-flung people to be linked and share information as never before, fostering new alliances and revolutionizing business. However, the tools developed so far are primarily intended to enable people to communicate at the individual and team level.